Rupert Murdoch’s War On The New York Times

“I read the Journal a little less now. I find that I can skim it in a way I couldn’t before. If the Journal is gaining market share I’d guess it is more at the expense of USA Today than the Times,” New York Times executive editor Bill Keller tells Vanity Fair writer Sarah Ellison. Of the Greater New York section, which the Journal launched as a direct competitor to the Times, Keller says: “It’s a small-town news section in a big city.”

Ellison reports on Rupert Murdoch’s war on The New York Times, and talks with Keller, Arthur Sulzberger, a current News Corp. executive, and former Murdoch lieutenants, among others, and writes that throughout Murdoch’s long career he has waged a series of battles against real or imagined foes. “News Corp. gets defined much more by who it is fighting against, than what it is fighting for,” one of the company’s executives tells Ellison.

“Can we talk about the use of the word ‘war’?” Sulzberger asks. “I think what’s important to understand is we don’t see this as a war.” And he’s adamant about not taking the bait, Ellison reports. “At the end of the day, you choose your enemies, you don’t let your enemies choose you,” Sulzberger says. He also tells Ellison that Murdoch’s anti-Times rhetoric “is not resonating with our advertisers, it’s not resonating with our readers, and quite frankly it’s not resonating with the American public.”As the Times’s circulation drops, Sulzberger tells people that his goal is not to be the largest-circulation paper in the country, which the Journal now is, but rather the “thought leader,” Ellison reports. She writes that Murdoch’s goal, aside from bragging rights, is to achieve that very distinction. When Ellison asks Sulzberger how he would define “winning” for The New York Times, he couldn’t sound more bloodless, she reports. “Winning for this institution is successfully transforming a print-based enterprise into a fully functioning print and digital multi-platform enterprise that has good profitability and good growth,” he says. Losing would be “failing to do those things.”

According to Keller, Murdoch’s newspaper wars “tend to look like demolition derbies. Nobody really wins, but there is a lot of carnage.” Keller points not only to The Times of London’s war with The Daily Telegraph but also to the New York Post’s battles with Mortimer Zuckerman’s Daily News. “Can you say he won either of those wars?” Keller asks Ellison. “You can’t say he raised the standards or the I.Q. of those publications.”

Ellison examines the differences between the Murdochs and the Ochs-Sulzbergers (and the Bancrofts, who sold to Murdoch) and reports that the Ochs-Sulzbergers have recently begun working with a company called Relative Solutions, which specializes in helping families with money work out interpersonal and intergenerational conflicts. At the moment, the main issue for the Ochs-Sulzbergers is whether they can sustain their loyalty to The New York Times even as the company becomes a financial drain on the inheritance of their children. Sulzberger says that Relative Solutions has worked with the Ochs-Sulzbergers on “staying close as we get bigger.” He emphasizes that the company has had no interaction with the New York Times Company per se: “It’s simply a matter of family dealing with family.” And he adds pointedly, “I won’t talk about that part.”

In a conversation about Pulitzers, Sulzberger rolls his eyes, telling Ellison that he knows what Rupert says, that he doesn’t care about winning them. “People who don’t win prizes generally say” that, he says. “But what they do care about is peer recognition. Because at the end of the day, that’s how we judge our effectiveness. That’s what the Pulitzers are. It’s our peers saying these are the great pieces of journalism in this period of time. And you know ,” he says, pausing meaningfully. “You’ve known the results over the last few years.” Sulzberger is so coy and oblique, Ellison writes, that it takes her a moment to realize that he is pointing out that the Journal hasn’t won a Pulitzer since Murdoch bought the paper.

Sulzberger says he runs into Murdoch from time to time and the meetings are cordial, and describes a scene at a recent dinner at Mayor Bloomberg’s for David Cameron. Sulzberger says that in his introduction the mayor said something to the effect of, “‘Mr. Prime Minister, I hope you caught that wonderful New York Times front-page story on all the tremendous things you’re doing in Britain.’” According to Ellison, Sulzberger smiles, almost giggles, as he recounts the moment, saying that he looked right at Rupert. Sulzberger frowns in his best grumpy-Murdoch impression. “Rupert owns The Times of London, The Sun,The Wall Street Journal. He helped elect this guy and here he is with all of his peers in New York, and it’s The New York Times that’s being lauded by Mike Bloomberg! It was a hysterical moment.”

Ellison also reports on the exchange between Sulzberger and Journal managing editor Robert Thomson, following Thomson’s decision to use a photo of Sulzberger’s chin in a montage to accompany an article about effeminate-looking men. Sulzberger says he greeted Thomson, who approached him a few minutes later saying that his face had not been used in the montage. That is “a lie,” Sulzberger tells Ellison. “He flat-out lied to me. When I asked him to run a correction or a clarification, he sort of waved his hand as he does and said, ‘We don’t do that kind of thing.’â¿¿” Sulzberger calls the exchange a “Fleet Street moment,” and continues: “The thought of an editor of The Wall Street Journal lying is literally unthinkable. It was unthinkable until then.”

Thomson, who calls the incident with Sulzberger “the battle of wounded chin,” has told friends that Sulzberger misunderstood the exchange, claiming that he was not distancing himself from the photo, merely saying that he was surprised by the way it had been interpreted in the media, as Thomson’s suggesting Sulzberger was effeminate.

Andrew Neil, who edited Murdoch’s Sunday Times, tells Ellison that he feels like “Americans have this patrician attitude that they have a God-given right to produce these boring newspapers and not be challenged to do it. The New York Times really thinks it’s the BBC”—or, more aptly, “the PBS of newsprint.” He goes on: “So, that’s what gets Murdoch’s juices going. He sees”—and here Neil pauses for emphasis and speaks the following words slowly and pointedly—“a fat pig there for the taking.” Ever in need of a foil, although the British class structure doesn’t exist here in America, Murdoch has identified The New York Times as the epitome of an entrenched elite, and according to Neil, the personification of what he disdains is Arthur Sulzberger Jr. “He’s always wanted to do this, but he’s been a general without an army. He had nothing to take The New York Times on with,” says Neil. Now, with the Journal behind him, “he’s got his army to march on the citadel.”

The October issue of Vanity Fair will be available on newsstands in New York and L.A. on Thursday, September 2, and nationally and on the iPad on Tuesday, September 7.